De-glitz OS X

We love the look and feel of OS X, and while some of its an­i­ma­tions can help to con­vey a sense of your po­si­tion in the sys­tem, you may find them

un­nec­es­sar­ily dis­tract­ing. In var­i­ous places you can tweak set­tings to speed up things like the slid­ing out of di­alogs that open or save files. Many set­tings, like that one, nor­mally have to be changed us­ing Ter­mi­nal, but a bet­ter way for most of us to ex­plore what’s pos­si­ble is TinkerTool (free, bresink.com).

Fur­ther, macOS Sierra of­fers a new item in its Ac­ces­si­bil­ity pane; Re­duce Mo­tion elim­i­nates fussi­ness when en­ter­ing fea­tures such as Mis­sion Con­trol or Launch­pad, say, re­plac­ing them with a brief cross­fade. On old Macs, in par­tic­u­lar those with an in­te­grated graph­ics pro­ces­sor, en­abling Re­duce Trans­parency quells some vis­ual ef­fects, slightly re­duc­ing the work­load.

TinkerTool of­fers a sim­ple way to tweak many hid­den vis­ual ef­fects in OS X.